Last week, 1966’s perfectly preserved Batman: The Movie hit Blu-Ray and the man himself, Adam West, was awesome enough to chat with me about life as the classic Caped Crusader and spill the beans on his greatest foe. — Damian Holbrook TV Guide: OK, so I have been a fan since I was a kid. You are the classic Batman…Adam West: Like Classic Coke. [Laughs] Makes a lot of people sick, ruins your teeth, ruins your stomach.TV Guide: But it’s so good! And I love that you haven’t turned your back on the past. A lot of actors dismiss their defining roles.West: Is that OK?TV Guide: Definitely.West: Good. [Laughs] I reasoned many years ago that not many actors get a chance, as you indicated, to play a defining role that kind of becomes their signature, if you will. And because I got that with Batman, I am one of the few, so why not embrace it? It makes a lot of people happy and that pleases me as well.TV Guide: And I am not ashamed to admit that I’m one of those...
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Since the TV-on-DVD craze went mainstream around 2000-2001, one of the burning, unanswered questions has been "when will episodes from the Adam West version of Batman finally come to DVD?" The classic, campy series has a ton of fans, and lots of rumors surround the reasons behind its absence from the DVD market.One popular rumor (possibly the most popular, especially on the internet) is that the hold-up is between Fox and Warner Brothers. But in a June 2006 interview with members of the Home Theater Forum website, executives from Warner Home Video stated that they have nothing to do with any sort of hold-up for Batman episodes. "This is an issue between DC (Comics) and Fox. Fox owns the series."For their part, Fox has told us "We are continuing to work on participations issues and resolve, so that we might be able to bring it out. The issue is that there are several entities that have rights to this particular series. The contract language didn't clearly specify home entertainment....
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Question Do you know what was the first TV show to have a feature length movie made about it while the show was still on the air Did that show see a bump in ratings because of the movie Ryan FlickChick This is an interesting question and I have to say up front that I have no way of answering the second part Im sure there is a way of getting ratings information for 1960s television shows and checking against the release dates of the appropriate feature films but it would involve physically sifting through archived network information that isnt readily available to outsiders And the more I think about it the less I am sure that the information is even there were talking about the same networks that regularly reused videotapes or dumped the only copies of early shows into catch-all storage facilities and forgot about them The first two Superbowl broadcasts were taped over and no-one knows what became of Johnny Carsons first appearance on The Tonight Show No
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What is the formula for blockbuster-movie success? And how does it differ from the recipe for disaster? Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters, an HBO documentary premiering tonight at 9 pm/ET — and based on the new book Boffo! How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb, by Variety editor-in-chief and former studio exec Peter Bart — explores those much-asked questions by way of A-list talking heads and fantastic clips from films both great and... so-so.
Bart says that — especially as cohost of AMC's Sunday Morn
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Normally I'm a sucker for a good bloodsucker, but I've seen paper cuts go deeper than Blade (Wednesdays at 10 pm/ET on Spike TV), the toothless new TV version of the comic-book-turned-film franchise about a hip-hop, Harley-riding, half-breed vampire who's bad news for his more evil brethren.
Where Buffy the Vampire Slayer took a mediocre film and elevated it to TV art, Blade doesn't even try to improve on the loud, flashily hollow movies. It's just more of the same martial artlessness. I kept expecting to see Batman-style OOF! BAM! graphics on screen.
"Sun's down. Time to make some friends," mutters Blade (Over There's Kirk
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